The drones of startup Garuda Aerospace will soon start delivering grocery packages in Bengaluru for food and grocery player Bundl Technologies Pvt Ltd known by its brand Swiggy. Garuda Aerospace is a drone-as-a-service provider. "This is a pilot project started by Swiggy. We plan to start the pilot during the first week of May," Agnishwar Jayaprakash, Founder & CEO, Garuda Aerospace, told IANS.
According to him, the drones will carry the grocery packs from the seller-run 'dark stores' and from a store to a common middle point - drone port - where the Swiggy delivery person will pick up the packet and deliver to the end customer. The common middle point is the responsibility of Swiggy and it will give the addresses, Jayaprakash said.
Swiggy in a blog post 'Swiggy Bytes' had said the pilot for its drone trials will be done in two tranches — with Garuda Aerospace undertaking it in Bengaluru and Skyeair Mobility in Delhi-NCR, which will start immediately. In the second tranche, after learnings from the first tranche are collated, ANRA and the TechEagle consortium as well as Marut Dronetech will conduct the pilot in second tranche.
The pilot, Swiggy said, is to “evaluate the feasibility of drones for the middle mile use case, particularly for Swiggy’s grocery delivery service Instamart”. It said that drones will be used to replenish stocks at darkstores, and from a store to a common customer point from where orders will be picked up by a delivery worker.
In December last year, Swiggy conducted trials with ANRA as part of its Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) trials last year, as part of which it conducted over 300 drone-led food and medicine delivery trials.
However, it is not known who will be liable for any public liability case and whether Swiggy has insisted the drone players take out a public liability insurance policy.
With IANS inputs